VMware bug keeps servers down

Author: Gareth Halfacree
Published: 14th August 2008
Comments (8) Stumble
VMware bug keeps servers down

The bug in the hypervisor resulted in systems being unable to restart as they considered the license invalid.

Users of popular corporate virtualisation tool VMware were left stranded this week when a glitch in the new hypervisor system left them unable to power up.

The VMware systems running ESX 3.5 Update 2 worked absolutely fine until the 12th of this month – when the systems decided that they were no longer licensed and refused to boot. As VMware is often used in corporations to turn multiple physical servers into a single box – with the energy and space savings that come with it – this caused no small amount of heartache as the dawning day spread across the world.

There was a simple way to ensure that your system wasn't affected, however: don't turn it off. Because the licence check happens only at startup, a running system would stay running with no ill effects – only when the system was shutdown and restarted for any reason did the problem rear its ugly head.

According to CNet, VMware's virtual infrastructure product marketing group manager Martin Niemar coughed to the source of the issue early on with the statement that the company “had an issue with [ESX] 3.5 Update 2” which he confirmed was “actually a licensing problem” which “prevents new virtual machines from powering up after shutdown, and it prevents virtual motioning – moving a virtual machine from one host to another.”

An early fix – to “move the clock backwards on the server” has now given way to an official patch available on VMware's website which promises to resolve the bug once and for all – finally allowing users the ability to reboot virtual machines without fearing that they might not come back again.

Do we have any VMware users reading who got bitten by this issue, or is the very thought of rebooting a server – even a virtual one – anathema? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
Quote Redbeaver 14th August 2008, 14:22
heh, i never upgrade our version of VMware in the office. still running an older version and it works just fine.
Quote yakyb 14th August 2008, 15:39
hahaha clearly

12/august = 12/08 ie misread to mean end of year funny

i love software bugs someof them are so silly
Quote TreeDude 14th August 2008, 15:54
We use VMware pretty heavily where I work. We virtualize anything that can be. We did not have this update applied though. We only do updates a few times a year to save on server down time.
Quote LordPyrinc 14th August 2008, 23:11
Lesson learned... never stand up new patches as soon as they are available. Wait a week or two to see if others experience problems. Especially if you have critical systems that could cost $$$ or worse if they go down unexpectedly.
Quote SlickGnome 15th August 2008, 13:58
Have VMware on in my test lab here, but Didn't have the update installed yet. Glad I didn't, but at least it would have only bee the test lab server (though that would have kicked my butt for some other migration testing I'm doing right now)
Quote seanblee 15th August 2008, 21:35
Affected 2 of our servers, though fortunately they were only running test machines, not production systems. Rumour has it they left in a time-bomb from the beta by mistake. Pretty careless tbh - they can't expect to be taken seriously against the likes of Microsoft when they do stupid things like this.
Quote ebola_one 17th August 2008, 03:47
We run a smallish farm, still running 3.0.2, we're looking at upgrading to 3.5 but had only started looking at 3.5 U1 (thankfully).
Quite funny, the dev guy working on the upgrade was peeved that he'd just downloaded 3.5u1 and a few days later 3.5u2 was released.
Quote seanblee 17th August 2008, 12:06
3.5u2 has some nice added server hardware monitoring features - it can read things like temperatures and voltages from BMC sensors, and also get health status from a bunch of different RAID controllers. Our servers are all Dell PowerEdge 2950s with PERC 6i controllers, so it's even able to read little things like RAID controller battery voltage and charge status - very cool. Now they've patched the time bomb thing, I'd strongly recommend looking at u2.
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